Between Red Wings: Aces of the Sky and Star Wars: Squadrons, I think it’s safe to say I just don’t like the flight-combat genre. Similar to first-person shooters, too many of them have enemy projectiles move way too fast to avoid them reliably (I thought at least Red Wings would be different because the store page describes it as “arcade action,” but nope; that’s just another meaningless buzzphrase, apparently). Squadrons at least tells you how to avoid homing missiles, but neither game lets you know how to avoid standard gunfire, and in Red Wings, it isn’t uncommon to get out of one enemy’s line of fire only to end up in another enemy’s line of fire immediately afterward, making it seem like nothing changed. I actually beat Red Wings (at least its red campaign, not its blue campaign because that’d just be more of the same), and its idea of a difficulty curve is just spamming more enemies with more hp. The closest it has to level design are the smoke-puff hazards that randomly appear in front of you and the three levels where you just fly through rings.

There were a couple other games I also gave up on, but I did eventually stumble upon a decent game:

Top-down Zeldaclone. The overworld (and I think one mini-dungeon in the second area) has fixed-design, but the dungeons are your standard roguelite “each room is handmade but the order is random” deal. Because of this, you don’t have to “complete” most rooms to progress; doing whatever switch-hunt they have usually just gives you some more gems that you can use to buy upgrades, though sometimes rooms give you a key upon completion instead. While most enemies end up being some variation of “move at you” and “shoot at you,” there’s still a good bit of variety, like how the lotus enemies just shamble around and toss short-range hazards 6-ways, or how the spiked beetles shoot wall-bouncing projectiles diagonally when they die. The game does have some puzzle elements at times, though the puzzles never get difficult; the ice-block (technically spider-block in this game) rooms in the first dudgeon are just as easy to solve as the ones in the fourth dungeon.

It’s not all good news, though. Because of the game’s RPG mechanics, enemies can take quite a few hits to die when you’re first starting, and you only get the gems to upgrade your stats within the dungeons (luckily, this game is actually designed around being able to avoid enemy attacks, so you can get away with upgrading your strength and not upgrading your health). On top of this, enemies can get knocked back a few units when you hit them, but sometimes, they don’t get knocked back at all, so if you try to preempt the knockback to kill them quicker, you run into them and take damage instead. Another annoying thing is jars; see, although most jars contain gems or healing items, some jars contain a snake that immediately beelines towards you instead, and you won’t be able to swing your sword again to attack it because–guess what–attack speed is something else you have to upgrade (and even then, you can only do three attacks before the game slows your attacks even more, despite the fact that you have plenty of stamina left). The only way to know ahead of time which jars contain snakes is if you see them shake, but this happens so infrequently, you might never see it happen before you go to break the jar.

Side note: while the game is mostly good about letting you upgrade whatever you want, the second area randomly makes you build the clinic before you can progress (AFAIK the only part of the game that does anything like this), but since you’re encouraged to spend as many gems as you can due to the fact that entering dungeons takes all of them away from you, it’s easy to end up not having enough and needing to go back and grind a bit more. You can’t even leave the dungeon once you get enough; you have to finish it (boss and everything) or die, then you can build the clinic and progress.

But the worst part of the game are the traps. They’re only indicated by the floor tile being a shade darker than ordinary floor tiles, so unless you’re specifically looking for them (and not, say, busy fighting enemies), you won’t see them. Sometimes, stepping on them will drop stuff from the ceiling, giving you a second to react, but other times, they immediately shoot you with arrows, at which point the only way you can avoid damage is if you already have your shield out (hold LT), already facing the direction the arrows are coming from. At least the wall-holes the arrows are shot from are well-indicated, but they can be off-screen when you hit the trap, catching you even more off-guard.

You can find “glass” versions of items within dungeons that only last for that particular run, but the game doesn’t fully explain how they work (I was blindsided by the fact the boomerang costs magic to use), and once you really start upgrading your sword’s attack, they mostly become ineffectual anyway (the game won’t let you upgrade glass items; you have to find their regular counterpart instead). Speaking of items, the two you’ll use the most are the grappling hook and the hammer (you get them from the first and second dungeons, respectively), but they’re pretty far apart on the item list, so the further in the game you get, the more items you’ll have to flip through before you get from one to the other. It’s a minor issue, but also a very simple fix; surprising they didn’t do it.

Bosses are fine, but dying to them means you have to go through more dungeon rooms again to retry, with the boss key always being in the same-designed room. The first one drops a lot of hazards from the ceiling, though you can see where they’ll fall by all the red circles, so you can usually reach safety. The second boss shoots waves of bullets that you can block (or deflect if you have the upgrade), and at certain points, it’ll turn into a flying disc and try to stomp you (which you can escape by doing a dash with the B button). The third boss splits into four, so you need to figure out which one is real, but all of them can abruptly spray projectiles that hurt you. Also, parts of the floor can boil over, but unlike previous boil-over tiles, the grating already has the orange lava clearly visible below it, so only the wire mesh turns orange as a warning instead of the entire tile turning orange, making it hard to notice. The fourth boss is the worst because not only are some of its attacks too fast for the slowest classes to avoid, but the arena is on ice, and the game’s ice physics are kinda bad even by ice physics standards. As the slower class, there were numerous times I couldn’t move at all until I used my dash move, and as the faster class, you move fast from a standstill but move slow if you let your momentum go down before moving again, making it hard to be precise. I only won because I started upgrading my health and just taking the hits. The final boss is easier because no ice, though it does start combining its attacks as its hp goes down, and they don’t always work with each other: one spawns hazards on all but the center column, while another sweeps all but the left/right edge with freezing wind, so the only way to avoid damage is to get frozen and hope you can break out before any of the boss’s projectiles reach you.

Overall, this game is okay despite the traps and other misc. issues. Even if you’re more of a Zeldaclone fan than a roguelite fan, I recommend getting it on sale.